[liberationtech] Wealthy entrepreneurs ask whether you would use a Liberationtech-friendly Twitter clone?

[Julian Oliver]

In agreement with Brian.

Perhaps worth putting to the 'wealthy entrepreneurs' that they may consider
donating instead to Mastodon's development/bug-bounties, an existing migration
target that is free, open source, and already supporting very large populations
across its many instances. If they would chose otherwise, I would question their
motives from the outset.

Further, the build-it-and-they-will-come fiction has played out very badly in
the past as regards community infrastructure. I think it wiser to better what we
already have, nourishing the work, thought and communities in place. 

Again, my only missive is that Mastodon DMs are not E2EE. Such a feature would
be a boon for Mastodon, not only as message transparency to sysadmins has been
oft cited in the past few days as a reason to not migrate to Mastodon (despite
the irony of Twitter being no different).

Cheers,

Julian

..on Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 09:56:55AM +0200, Bill Woodcock wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Apr 28, 2022, at 1:49 AM, Brian Behlendorf <brian at behlendorf.com> wrote:
> > If there is any lesson from all this, I suspect it's that any centralized communication service even run by the most competent, well intentioned, humble and not-profit-oriented (clearly, judging from their stock price) founders & techs is susceptable to subsequent capture by others. As the open source software community figured out, the "right to fork" is the only meaningful check on the winner-take-all power-corrupts dynamic in networks.
> > 
> > So I think the answer is, those founders should either make their service with, or just go use one of the existing implementations of, Mastodon or other emerging dweb alternatives.
> 
> Yep, what Brian said.
> 
> The only legitimate way to do anything, pretty much, is by inclusively designing an open protocol, and then letting people who want to use it implement it.  If the protocol is well designed, you’re done.  No “service” needed.
> 
>                                 -Bill
> 



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